Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Random Musings - February 2012

Well the awards season is over without much surprise, and I am pleased that A Separation won for Best Foreign Language film. For the first time since 2003 I agree with the Academy's choice.

It was also nice to see a French film dominate the major awards, even though I wasn't as impressed with it as much as most. However, the ceremony as always, was way too long and boring. I wish they would cut the unfunny fluff and let the winners have more time at the podium. Also why didn't they perform the nominated songs? Terrible decision.

The funniest line of the weekend was delivered on Friday by Antoine de Caunes, host of the César Awards, which was otherwise just as dull as the Oscars were. Just before the presentation of the in memoriam montage he quipped: "This year, we lost a giant of cinema. Megaupload."

For some quick blog news, I took a slight dip in page views compared to January, but still managed to pass the 250K mark. With some help from an increased interest in my coverage of the foreign language nominees, and also being selected as Lamb of the Month.

I've also been toying with the idea of adding a ranked blog roll widget to my sidebar. Similar to the LAMB's Leaderboard, to reward the blogs who send me the most referral traffic, except this one will be automatically updated. What do you guys think?

I caught up with quite a few 2011 releases this month, but there are still a bunch more I want to see, hopefully I can get to them in soon. In March, I'll also be continuing with my Czech New Wave series which I'm about half way through; and I've begun to source some films for my next major spotlight, I'm not yet ready to reveal what it will be, but the idea was inspired by this year's Berlinale.

Random Blogging Tip of the Month

For this month's blogging tip, check out my article at Stupid Blog Tricks where I compare the different related post widgets offered by LinkWithin, Outbrain, and nRelate. They are a great way to boost your blog's traffic (accounting for ~5% of my pageviews), to keep visitors on your site longer, and to call attention to your older forgotten posts. If you don't have one on your blog, you should seriously consider it.

Random Links of the Month

I usually highlight my favorite new blog finds in this section, but I've already mentioned most of them in an earlier post, so this month's links will be a random assortment of posts that caught my eye from new and old favorites:

45 comments:

Thank you so much for the mention of my updated url. I have thoroughly enjoyed your Argento reviews too. Deep Red is the best film I have seen this month, and I was so happy to see you rated Deep Red, Suspiria and Tenebrae all above 9.0. Also, I really liked Inferno, though I haven't written anything on it. Pretty underrated.

Hey Bonjour I don't know which blog platform you are using but I'd definitively be interested in getting one of those self updated traffic leaderboards for the LAMB since its as of now is one of the most tedious things to update on there. It would be awesome if we could do some kind of collaboration with that if possibly.

I also think you are high lighting the wrong Leap Year film. =) Hahaha

I have really been enjoying your Stupid Tricks Blog of late. Still getting use to life without word verification but so far so good. Any chance you will be doing a post on how to add jquery slider in blogger? I have been toying with the idea of adding one similar to yours on my site.

Congrats for the 250K again! I like the idea of a Blogroll! I also want to to do some self-promotion by announcing my Je me souviens feature that highlights and presents films from my Province; Québec.

My February was busy as all hell, and it was just this past weekend that gave me the biggest takeaway. I went to an "Unconference" on podcasting, blogging, and all things social media and it gave me a lot of ideas for improvements to my site and its various soapboxes.

There were even a few sessions that I found myself wishing I'd recorded to share with my fellow bloggers and podcasters. What's that they say about hindsight?

Thanks Joel Burman I'm flattered that you can't tell that this is a Blogger blog. :)

I would definitely be willing to share, or even help implement the leaderboard thing over on the LAMB whenever I get it done. It's only an idea right now, I haven't actually started creating anything yet. But it's nice to see there's some interest.

The ranked blog roll is a decent idea to show off the bigger supporters, but as an internet user I've never used the system, it's always been clutter on the websites I visit. I keep mine to max 5 for that very reason.

ALL your posts are great, but I do love the Czech New Wave ones!I also loved that megaupload quote - ah the pain the pain....And thank you as always for great new links. Your blog is great and one of the few I visit every day.

I agree with you, I never use them that's why I've never installed one. I used to years back when blogs were a new thing, but most people add links and never take them off, so after awhile many of those links end up going to dead or abandoned blogs. Now I've conditioned myself to see all blogrolls like that.

I think a nice endorsement within the context of a post is much more effective, but I also figured it would be nice to have a top 10 to pay back blogs that send me traffic.

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